Odd Signs & Symbols

Here's an amusing sign from downtown Salt Lake City.  Normally a sign saying no parking or no loitering would not pop up on my radar.  And if it just said "No Cruising" and left it to our imaginations, I would also pass it by.  Of course I wondered how they know someone is cruising, so they spelled out the definition of cruising. Now we're talking.  Cruising is: "passing a control point in a particular direction more than 2 times between the hours of 11 PM and 4 AM."  That's strangely precise.  Except, where is this control point, and which direction?  If you pass it north and then come back south, does that count as two passes?  They're not the same "particular" direction.  And what if you're just bored and you left your house not really going in any particular direction?  Is that a Get Out of Jail Free card. Below that is a no parking sign.  So if you're about to pass a second time and you catch yourself misbehaving, you're al

Here you go.  Two elevators at the University of Utah Hospital.  One says they're having intermittent service issues, and the other says "Out of Order".  Guess what?  They're both fine and people are using both of them.  An employee even said, "Yeah, we just ignore those." I don't get it.  Why on earth would I willingly get on an elevator with known issues?  And who are these people who are braving the "Out of Order" one?  That just sounds bad.  I watched people coming and going for a few minutes.  How do they not care if it's safe. These are accidents waiting to happen ... at a hospital.  But damn there are a lot of stairs.   I did try the less broken elevator once.  Once.  It jerked and groaned (the other two people didn't seem to notice) and had shockingly loud beeps at each floor (nobody cared).  I'm not doing that again.   Now, why are the doors painted to look like a peaceful birch forest biome?  It's jarring when the stee

  Speaking of change -- see last post -- here's a vending machine with a very rare sticker that says it takes $1 presidential coins.  Wow, I have never seen that before.  Hardly any machine takes those, which is fine because almost nobody has them.  If you want them, go to any vending machine at any post office, and the machines will happily take money and give $1 coins as change ... while not accepting those same $1 coins as payment.  So ... ... in this case the machine says it wants the $1 coins, but what does it give as change. A handful of dimes.  Which you could probably use at the post office.  But for now, my back pocket sounds like a muffled "Jingle Bells" of hot dimes grinding together for the rest of the day. Great system.

    At first glance, having a Road Closed sign up in front of a concrete wall that's obviously not a road might seem odd.  You wouldn't try to drive through the wall, would you?  But this is the parking garage at the University of Utah Hospital, and there's a massive construction project on the other side of that wall.  Roads diverted, backhoes and cranes hard at work, an epic mess as far as the eye can see.  In the end, they're going to be running an access ramp up to the other side of that concrete wall, the wall will come down and escape will be possible.  Nothing changes except change itself.